Telefónica working with Mozilla to build open Web-centric smartphone

Mozilla announced today that it is partnered with Telefónica to develop a …

Mozilla announced today that it has partnered with mobile network operator Telefónica to deliver a complete mobile operating system built around standards-based Web technologies. They plan to bring the platform to market later this year on a prototype device that they are developing in collaboration with Qualcomm.

The new operating system, which is called the Open Web Devices (OWD) platform, is based on Mozilla's Boot2Gecko (B2G) project. Mozilla launched B2G last year with the aim of building a Linux-based mobile computing environment with an application stack that runs entirely in Gecko, the HTML rendering engine that is used in the Firefox Web browser.

According to a statement from Mozilla, Telefónica was already evaluating the feasibility of creating its own Web-centric mobile platform when the B2G project was first announced. Telefónica subsequently decided to bring its ideas to B2G and join Mozilla in a cooperative development effort.

Their initial target is to produce devices with smartphone-like capabilities that can be built inexpensively and sold at the price of a common feature phone. Telefónica believes that the unique advantages of a platform built around Web technologies will potentially reduce development and production costs, enabling the company to make devices that are a good fit for regions where smartphones have historically been too expensive for widespread adoption.

"From our experience in Latin America we know that a huge part of the market is not being catered for by current smartphones," said Telefónica Digital product development director Carlos Domingo in a statement. "With new open Web devices we will be able to offer a smartphone experience at the right price point for these customers."

As we recently reported in our hands-on look at B2G, Mozilla is introducing a number of new JavaScript APIs that expose device functionality to Web content. These include APIs for measuring device battery level and communicating with a device's cellular radio.

Mozilla has been working with the W3C to turn its new APIs into open standards with the hope that the technology will be embraced by other browser vendors. In today's announcement, Mozilla revealed that it plans to take this effort one step further by turning the whole OWD platform into an open standard.

"Because of this initiative’s commitment to openness, this reference implementation will be submitted for standardization to W3C," Mozilla told us in an e-mail. "The objective is that there are no proprietary APIs within the device architecture, making phones developed using it the only truly open devices on the market."

The initial OWD prototype device will be built around a Qualcomm chipset, but the exact specifications have not yet been disclosed. In light of the focus on low cost, it's likely that the specs will be modest. Mozilla contends that OWD is lighter than some other mobile platforms because its simple HTML-on-Linux architecture eliminates the need for a lot of the intermediate layers that would otherwise be necessary.

According to Mozilla, this lack of overhead will allow OWD to run efficiently on less expensive hardware than its rivals. But HTML rendering engines are hardly lightweight--it is still unclear whether a user experience built entirely with HTML and JavaScript will be able to fully match the performance and responsiveness of native code on a mobile device.

It does seems clear, however, that the extensive use of HTML will help accelerate OWD development and vastly simplify the sort of customizations that mobile network operators typically make. Mozilla was able to get its B2G home screen interface up and running very quickly due to the strengths of HTML as an environment for creating interactive user experiences.

Another question that is left unanswered is which handset manufacturer will actually build the launch device for Telefónica. A number of rumors that have circulated over the past few days suggest that LG will be involved in building the first handset based on the B2G project. It's possible that LG is involved, but that hasn't been confirmed yet.

15 Reader Comments

I wonder if there's space for something skin to the raspberrypi but for phones, imagine a RP with cell and buttons and an open stack for development, sold for $50 or so. I hope this turns out like that in which case nokia will see its existing low-end dominance eroded as much as it's high end has been.

Seriously mixed feelings here. I appreciate more open smartphone OS. But I can't help but think how much greater it would be if Mozilla worked with HP on WebOS. Open up the APIs, make a better browser, work with a UI that is already fantastic in an architecture that is already the most open for users.

Seriously mixed feelings here. I appreciate more open smartphone OS. But I can't help but think how much greater it would be if Mozilla worked with HP on WebOS. Open up the APIs, make a better browser, work with a UI that is already fantastic in an architecture that is already the most open for users.

Seriously mixed feelings here. I appreciate more open smartphone OS. But I can't help but think how much greater it would be if Mozilla worked with HP on WebOS. Open up the APIs, make a better browser, work with a UI that is already fantastic in an architecture that is already the most open for users.

When HP reversed course and decided to open up WebOS (and not kill it), B2G was already in full thrust. It would have been nice if HP had instead joined Mozilla, but having another mobile OS option that is open isn't a bad thing too. Would be nice if WebOS follows B2G's lead and uses only standard HTML5 APIs though - then the two platforms could be interoperable.

Presto is very lightweight. Gecko on the other hand is a huge pig. Webkit is somewhere in between

I would like to see statistics on this for more recent versions of Gecko. Mozilla team has been working hard to fix memory leaks and general usage. And even my rooted, minimalist Andriod phone still uses over 150 MB on boot.

Presto is very lightweight. Gecko on the other hand is a huge pig. Webkit is somewhere in between

How do you know? Do you have access to the Presto source?

In any case, Opera Mini uses a tiny sub-set of Presto, Opera Mobile cuts support for many features too. Webkit on Safari iOS is equivalent to Webkit on desktop Safari, but Webkit on Android OS is gutted too. Gecko on Android has the same capabilities as Gecko on desktop.

The perceived "heaviness" is not because of Gecko but because of all the XUL APIs that allow Firefox to be so extensible and customizable (essentially XUL is like HTML for the user interface, and in combination with JS an extension developer, or even someone that wants to create an application with xulrunner can do practically everything) but not without cost.

Gecko without XUL is lightweight too as personal experience with the native Android Firefox builds has shown. B2G has no XUL, so we can expect it to be very lightweight too.

Gecko without XUL is lightweight too as personal experience with the native Android Firefox builds has shown. B2G has no XUL, so we can expect it to be very lightweight too.

Yeah, the new Native Android Firefox (not the older XUL Android Firefox) now in beta is closer to what B2G uses - there is no XUL overhead, so it's much faster and more responsive.

A lot of people confuse Gecko and Firefox. They are not the same, Gecko for example has a multiprocess architecture which Firefox doesn't use (it would break existing addons), and Firefox uses XUL which is not a mandatory part of Gecko.

Make me a smartphone with *decent* web capabilities, for the price of a feature phone, and whose parent company I don't regret supporting (Mozilla instead of Apple or Google), and I'll be the first in line.